Lord Lexden: My Lords, I declare my interest as president of the Independent Schools Association, which has nearly 550 members. I speak on their behalf. They are good schools. In no way are they grand schools. They do not retard social mobility; they assist it. People who proclaim their opposition to independent education because it provides only for a wealthy elite should visit some of them. Drop in on the Old Vicarage School at Darley Abbey in Derbyshire, a co-ed preparing 160 pupils for education post 13 and charging extremely modest fees. Or call in at Maple Hayes Hall school near Lichfield, which, year by year, achieves spectacular results for around 100 children with severe dyslexia, yet has to fight local authorities that try to stop families choosing state-funded places there, to which they are entitled.
It is tragic that these schools, firmly based in their local communities, should have to listen to pundits and politicians calling for their abolition. For them, for the independent sector as a whole and for our country, the right route to greater social mobility is through widening access to them, on which the Independent Schools Council has made major proposals to the Government—I am sorry to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is not in favour of such a course—and through ever closer association with state schools. There are now nearly 11,500 partnership schemes bringing schools together in a two-way process for joint music lessons, joint teaching of STEM subjects and much else besides.
In 2011, just three students from the London Borough of Newham went to Oxford. In 2019, the London Academy of Excellence in Newham, sponsored by six independent schools, sent 25 pupils to Oxbridge. Such initiatives highlight what the independent/state school partnership can achieve in assisting social mobility.